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Dear Avarna community, We’re only four months into four years of this presidential administration, and the attacks on everything our community values—equity, justice, the environment—feel relentless.  So what can I offer you that doesn’t just become more noise? More punditry purporting to predict a future that we cannot see? I…

Avarna Community,  It is with nearly all the emotions you might find in an emotions wheel that I am announcing my departure from the Avarna Group. I have felt sadness, anxiety, excitement, relief, pride, and a lot more as I think about moving on. But the one feeling I keep…

The current administration’s anti-DEI Executive Orders have sparked varied responses in the nonprofit and private sectors—some organizations are defending DEI in name and practice, while others are scrubbing it from materials and rebranding. But there’s a third way. Jujitsu teaches us to use an opponent’s momentum against them. What if…

Photo Description: Underground tunnel Dear Avarna community, The political attack on DEI has escalated in the past two weeks, with Executive Orders and memoranda dismantling federal DEI offices, encouraging employees to inform on DEI supporters, demanding lists of DEI contractors (including us), attempting to block funding to any DEI-related programming…

Image description: author’s rendition of the anti-DEI monster (a/k/a Froghemoth from Dungeons & Dragons) By aparna rajagopal Nearly every day, clients and community members are asking us what to do in the face of the public and legal backlash against DEI. With the increasing frequency of these conversations and the…

By: Ava Holliday and Aparna Rajagopal In her essay “Poetry is not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote "there are no new ideas-there are only new ways of making them felt." (Sister Outsider, p. 39). Over the past week we have heard people speak their truths and share ideas, and we…

Dear Community, Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we at the Avarna Group have been trying to figure out our role, what to say, and how to move forward. We know that COVID-19 has exposed structural inequities and injustices that predated the pandemic, and that individual and institutional responses…

As the year draws to a close and my family enters cookie baking mode, I’m thinking about a harder nut to crack than chestnuts on an open fire: white-led conservation and outdoor nonprofit boards.  We’ve noticed that in their urgency to diversify, many conservation and outdoor nonprofit boards have been…

In the spring, PGM ONE organizers asked me to write a piece about why white folks shouldn’t show up to PGM ONE. It was a piece that flowed out of me easily. I had been having the conversation about the importance and value of affinity spaces for people with marginalized…

We wanted to tell you the story of why we decided to create yet another equality v. equity (v. justice) image series, which you can access here. For those of you who have been engaged in some conversation about equity in the past ten years, you inevitably have come across…

Similar to when Camber Outdoors unveiled its 2019 Pledge, we (Ava and Aparna) have had a lot of thoughts and ideas swirling around in our heads as the #WontTakeSHIFTAnymore campaign has rolled out. We have brains that tend to go into a mode that we lovingly call, “entropic processing overdrive,”…

A statement by the founders of the Avarna Group. As a company, we’ve been quiet about the announcement of the Camber Outdoors CEO pledge over the past few days, but not for lack of thoughts about the whole situation. On the contrary, we’ve been teeming with thoughts. In between flights,…